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History

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS, formerly known as the New York Zoological Society) was founded in 1895 and has its headquarters in the Bronx Zoo, New York, USA. WCS is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization known around the world for its pioneering work on wildlife research and conservation. WCS presently has over 500 projects in more than 60 countries and employs over 1,900 staff around the world.

WCS has over 120 years of experience developing and implementing focused strategies to resolve conflicts between people and wildlife that threaten the long-term persistence of globally significant wild places and the biodiversity they support. Our extensive international experience provides us an invaluable opportunity to compare best practices within and across sites. It also allows us to better identify key issues of global concern to the conservation community, such as co-management of conservation landscapes and protected area law enforcement, and how these play out in different bio-geographic and socio-political contexts, and with different types and severity of threats.

WCS has a long history of experience in Pakistan, beginning with Dr. George Schaller’s wildlife surveys on snow leopards and wild sheep and goats – the “mountain monarchs” – of Pakistan’s northern mountains in the 1970s, which led to the creation of Khunjerab National Park. In 1992, Peter Zahler began work in Gilgit-Baltistan (then known as the Northern Areas), rediscovering the woolly flying squirrel and developing what is now the WCS Pakistan Program. The WCS Pakistan Program is managed from the WCS Pakistan Program office in Gilgit by Mayoor Khan, a native of Diamer District.